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Craftsman's renaissance

Demand for well-designed and finely made things was enhanced during the boom. But leaner times won't spell the end for the craft professionals if they reach out to find new customers, says Emma de Vita.

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Published: 01 Nov 2008

Last Updated: 09 Oct 2013

Climb the Acropolis to the Parthenon and you'll hear the tap of chisel
against marble as stonemasons restore the crumbling Athenian temple. The
sound has been heard on this hill for more than two millennia. The long
craftsmen tradition worked hard to survive mechanisation,
industrialisation and mass consumerism, and just when it looked like the
final 'Made in China' nail was being hammered into its coffin, it stages
a comeback.

'There is definitely a resurgence for craftsmanship and for
Britishness,' declares Geoffroy de La Bourdonnaye, CEO of London
department store Liberty. 'Everything that has something to do with
longevity, simplicity and craftsmanship is doing very well.'

Bespoke - a concept that large luxury businesses have embraced since the
turn of the century - is in vogue. 'If one looks back to what big brands
have been doing for the past eight years,' says Anda Rowland, director
of Savile Row tailor Anderson & Sheppard, 'they've all been trying to
get that element of personalisation back into their brands.'

With a nose for business (she is the late Tiny Rowland's daughter, after
all) and years spent at Christian Dior, Rowland is a protagonist in
British luxury retail. She explains that although mature European luxury
brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent have to keep
on expanding, they still need to preserve their allure of exclusivity.
Creating something personalised fits the bill nicely.

But the desire for bespoke isn't the sole preserve of Russian
billionaires or LA celebrities; middle-class consumers are preferring
the individual over the mass-produced too. 'When you look back to what
generated the Arts & Crafts movement,' says De La Bourdonnaye, 'it was
almost a reaction to the industrial revolution. Now, I think (the crafts
resurgence) is a reaction to globalisation.'

The feeling goes beyond fashion whimsy. 'The era of the mass market is
in decline,' says Roland Harwood, programme director for open innovation
at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. 'People
are looking for more bespoke products, and online businesses are
enabling a greater amount of choice.' It's called the Long Tail.

By buying a customised bicycle or a finely bound book, you express your
personal values. 'You're buying into a way of living,' explains Rosy
Greenlees, executive director of the Crafts Council. 'It's about having
meaning in your life and getting that through the things you buy.' Add
to this the middle-class preoccupation with buying local and a renewed
interest in craft becomes inevitable. Remarks Rowland: 'We have come
back into fashion again.'

But what of the craftsmen and women themselves? With many traditional
crafts close to extinction, there's a last-minute awareness that
generations of skill and expertise could be lost for ever. Youth brings
a fresh viewpoint, but it's hard to coax a traditional, slow-moving
business into a new way of doing things. 'Tailoring is
backwards-looking,' says Rowland, 'and that is the beauty of it. But
when you are in business that is backwards-looking, everything tends to
be backwards-looking.'

But moving with the times to appeal to a new generation of consumers
raised on supermarkets, slick packaging and the internet pays off. A
craft business that makes the most of its uniqueness and reaches out to
a new audience through the internet, using clever marketing and a modern
take on its products, has no reason to fail - although inevitably the
coming recession make things trickier. The mass of affluent people who
had the money to spend on a handmade suit or a bespoke piece of
furniture will be feeling the pinch.

'When times get tight, it's not top of the priority list,' agrees John
Bates, adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at London Business School.
'The trick for those craft businesses is to make sure that they can keep
their overheads extremely low and generate some revenues by doing a lot
more restoring to keep their powder dry for when things pick up.' The
mini golden age is over, he adds. 'In the late stages of a boom there
are lots of resources around and I think we can look back on the Damien
Hirst Sotheby auction as probably the final hurrah.'

RIDING HIGH: MERCIAN CYCLES

'Be prepared to step back in time,' warns Jane Smith with a smile, as
she opens up the Derby bicycle workshop she owns with partner Grant
Mosley. The couple took on the firm in 2002, when the previous owner
retired. She was in newspaper ad sales, he had worked for Mercian man
and boy in a part of the country that has a long cycling heritage.

Smith and Mosley remortgaged their house to buy the business. 'But you
don't get many opportunities in your lifetime like that,' says
Smith.

Mercian, which make a range of bike frames, was founded by two cyclists
in 1946 and employed eight framebuilders in its heyday. Now there are
three, plus two sprayers in the paintshop and four assistants in the
shop. The company makes its customised bikes out of Birmingham-made
Reynolds steel tubes, entirely by hand.

Designer Paul Smith (whose first bike was a Mercian) was so impressed by
the firm's craftmanship that he commissioned his own range of bikes in
2006. They're not cheap - a Paul Smith bike will set you back £2,800, while a Mercian frame costs around £800 - but business is
booming and Mercian now has a five-month waiting list.

Says Mosley: 'I think people are willing to pay for a real top-class
job. We've had a couple of customers save up for years for one of our
frames.' They've had customers travel down from Orkney, and a US
holidaymaker diverted a tour bus so he could come and place an
order.

The Paul Smith collaboration, new frame types and a ramped-up website
has recast Mercian as a modern craft business. 'When we first took over,
our customer base was blokes with beards, socks and sandals after a
traditional tourer,' says Mosley. Now, they're more likely to be young
metropolitans after a track bike in a wild colour.

In the workshop there are tools, components and beautiful frames all
over the place, but an air of quiet concentration reigns. Framebuilder
Tim Leicester, 32, an engineering graduate from Cambridge, eschewed the
corporate career path for his dream job. 'Why waste a third of your life
doing something you're not enjoying? I get the satisfaction from making
a bike and seeing it out the door.'

Smith and Mosley are optimistic and have yet to feel any effects from
the recession. 'Everyone is going to be worried,' says Smith, 'but at
the end of the day, what can you do about it apart from do what you do
every week, and that is try and produce the best items you can.'

Not many businesses can leave a grown man weeping with joy.

www.merciancycles.com

IN A NICHE: RICHARD WILLIAMS FURNITURE

Walk into Richard Williams' Buckinghamshire workshop and you're struck
by the smell of timber. This is no ordinary workplace. Two cabinetmakers
are hunched over their benches in steady concentration, sanding and
sawing wood. Williams, 42, is tucked away in his office. He has been
designing award-winning bespoke pieces for 18 years and built this
business from scratch. Soon, it will expand into a new workshop twice
the size, and he'll add three more craftsmen to his team of four.

His journey as a small businessman has not been easy. Till five years
ago, he found it hard to make a good profit, despite strong orders and
committed clients. A consultant brought in by Business Link proved
disastrous, but with the help of someone who appreciated his output,
business improved. Says Williams: 'I was a one-man management team,
juggling so many balls that I was dropping half of them.'

He took on a PA, delegated management of his workshop to one of his
cabinetmakers, and implemented proper costing procedures. That allowed
him to focus on design, sales and strategy. His profit has shot up, and
it's a visible relief. Williams says he was guided by something his
father - a lifetime banker - told him: 'Don't do what I did, which was
to spend 38 years at the same desk in the bank.'

He studied furniture-making at High Wycombe, traditionally the centre
for the craft in this country - 'but not any more,' he adds, 'British
furniture-making has hit the wall. We can survive because we are right
in a niche of the market, and that can only be served by our level of
bespoke service.'

He is one of about 200 designer/furniture-makers in the UK and his
clients commission either one-off pieces or whole rooms. He finds the
bigger jobs, often commissioned by an architect or interior designer,
less fulfilling.

But the work pays - last year, he completed £200,000-worth of
furniture for just one person. It's now rarely about 'making lovely
things for lovely people', he relucantly admits.

Exhibitions and verbal recommendation have taken him to capacity, but
Williams plans a proper marketing campaign next year. Despite the
recession, he remains pretty optimistic. 'There is more of an interest
in properly made bespoke products. I don't think it will ever explode,
but I think it's fairly safe. It will always be here, but we'll never be
a country full of craftsmen again.'

www.richardwilliamsfurniture.com

HIGH-MARGIN, LOW-VOLUME: SHEPHERDS BOOKBINDERS

It's a bibliophile's idea of heaven. Rob Shepherd's office at his
Holborn shop in central London has beautifully bound first editions on
the shelf above his desk. Nestled among them are boxes of Ian Fleming's
complete works that will sell for £14,000 a set. The most
expensive book Shepherd ever sold was at Sotheby's, the Ruba'iyat of
Omar Khayyam for £28,000. Even his more usual bindings rarely cost
less than £1,000.

Shepherd's career as a bookbinder was accidental. Its origin was in an
evening class that eventually led him in 1988 to set up his own
fine-binding business. Turnover stands at around £1.5m and in the
past decade he has bought the London binders Sangorski & Sutcliffe and
Zaehnsdorf, as well as Falkiner Fine Papers. Shepherd spends his time
running the business rather than binding. He employs 30 people, 10 of
whom were apprentice-trained. 'They are very rare people,' he says. Does
he feel like a custodian of a tradition? 'Yes, definitely.'

Book-binding is a high-margin, low-volume business and Shepherd says his
company has always turned a profit. A straightforward £500 binding
will take 10 hours' work. 'Fine binding is absolutely the pinnacle of
what you can achieve in the craft. We will never roll that out into
something much bigger than it is because it will always be limited by
the amount of craftsmen you can actually train to do it.'

His customers are the well-off, and the company has diversified into
products such as boxes, photograph albums and notebooks, which keep the
18 craftsmen whom Shepherd employs busy. 'I think "Made in England" is
the way it's all going,' he says, citing ethical consumerism. But
there's something more intangible at work too: 'It's to do with people
reassessing the way we all live - the concept of knowing something is
made well and by someone you might recognise in the street. There's a
little revolution going on.'

Shepherd's products are now sold in Liberty and he has just finished
major work on the other of his two London shops on Rochester Row so that
customers will be able to see the craftsmen at work. With the help of
private shareholders, Shepherd has also rented a barn in Wiltshire that
will concentrate solely on the product side of the business.

Shepherd says that he feels optimistic about the future, 'because I
think people value what we do more and more' - despite the fact that
fewer wealthy people appreciate books. 'Pick up Hello! magazine and you
won't see many libraries,' he adds.

And what of the recession? 'I've been through two, and I was lucky not
to have felt any particular effects. I don't think anybody is
recession-proof, but I've yet to see any issues.'

Instead, he says his products have hit the current mood. 'People are
interested in working with their hands. It's all part of a movement away
from mass production and computers. People are realising that a finely
bound book is a wonderful thing.'